I don't think Wikipedia is going down the toilet, nor do I think it was a failure. Personally, I don't think the graphs are surprising: first Wikipedia becomes

I don't think Wikipedia is going down the toilet, nor do I think it was a failure. Personally, I don't think the graphs are surprising: first Wikipedia becomes a big hit, and loads of people sign up. Then, as time passes, some people become unactive. In the end, I think we'll still have a pretty large baseline editing Wikipedia. The biggest problem I see with Wikipedia is that it's only reliable as long as you're looking up non-controversial issues. Thus, it's fine when you're looking for definitions and trivia, but when it comes to the interesting stuff - pretty much all of which is controversial, because that's where the good bits of science happen - Wikipedia is horrible. In these cases, it is much better to check out (for example) Google Scholar and search for scientific articles directly. Ah, if only there were an encyclopedia that would directly list all the appropriate references for a given subject. I'd pay good money for that.